About “The Triumph of Bullshit”

A “burn” poem directed by the young T. S. Eliot against his critics, and his female critics in particular. Unpublished during his lifetime, it first appeared in the posthumous volume Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (1997). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the title contains the first recorded instance of the word “bullshit” (though the term had probably been floating around in popular slang for a while before that). The second, third, and fourth recorded instances, by the way, belong to Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and E. E. Cummings. Next time you call something bullshit, you can congratulate yourself on your sophisticated literary putdown.